Remembering the Future

• The name of the business process that initiates the event.
• The timing or frequency that this event will occur and the conditions under which it will occur.
• The schema (an XSD will do here) of the fields and the data types for those fields.  In addition, a description of the domain values and their meanings in the context of the business event is required.
• The mechanism by which this event will be published (to be used by consumers who want to gain awareness of the event).
• The expected list of consumers of the event (not that the person doing the describing may not know, and probably never will know, the complete list of consumers.  That isn't the point.  This is here to help communicate how this event schema can be used as part of a business process).

Topics: SOA | Workflow

Fit allows customers, testers, and programmers to learn what their software should do and what it does do. It automatically compares customers' expectations to actual results.

Topics: Testing | Learning

For those that have chosen a service oriented path, the decision seems to be clear: "The WSDL is the Offshore Contract". In other words, domestic employees will work on business processes, enterprise architecture, orchestrations (agile controllers) and service design (up to the WSDL). And building the service? You got it - offshore.

Topics: Programming | SOA

"It's such a great product," says the PointyHairedBoss, "just look at all the AutomatedCodeGeneration it does for you!"

"Dude!" I say, "you just don't understand: The need to do lots of AutomatedCodeGeneration is a flaw, not a feature."

Topics: Code Generation | Design

Imagine that you are in a darkened room. The only thing you see is a point source of light. Suddenly, the light goes out. What happened? Perhaps, the light was extinguished. Maybe, something moved to stop the light reaching you. Then again, it is possible that you’ve gone blind. Working out what exactly did happen is non-trivial. One thing, however, we can be sure of – something has changed.

That this is the correct conclusion to draw is clear when we consider the alternative; if nothing has changed then why did we experience a change? To account for the observed change it is necessary to postulate a difference somewhere in our ontology, be it a distinction located internally (going blind) or one that is at least in part external (the light being extinguished or something having moved).

. . .

observing a distinction does not suffice to specify its cause nor, indeed, does is serve to classify the elements distinguished. As such, any error that occurs can be understood as the result of an incorrect interpretation of the original distinction, i.e. we didn’t go blind but merely had a barrier slid in between us and the light-source. Thus, for example, the sceptical argument based on Descartes’ Deceiving Demon does not affect experience, since the error in question is that of misinterpreting the experience caused by the demon as an experience of a reality not shaped by a demon. As it turns out in that case, however, the experiences are actually informative of what the demon wishes us to believe and, therefore, once understood correctly, can play the role of experience that informs us about reality. Even ‘the most internal’ of causes, such as a theory, does not render a distinction erroneous. A perceived distinction which was merely the result of one of our theories is still informative – it is simply informative of that theory. Only assuming that the distinction had some external cause would lead to error – the distinctions, in themselves, neither make nor entail any such claims. To put it simply, for every perceived distinction there is a real distinction – where “we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be” (Peirce 1878). Thus, when we perceive distinctions we perceive the real world rather than, necessarily, the external world.

Topics: Meaning | Induction | Inference